social media

If your business doesn’t already have a plan to integrate shopping tools into your social media accounts, it may be time to develop one based on network demographics and your customer profile.

Social shopping growth is outpacing general e-commerce growth and growing fast, especially on mobile devices, and “buy buttons” aren’t even out of the testing phase yet for many platforms. In 2014, social shopping revenues topped $3 billion among the 500 largest US retailers, and the number of social media e-commerce referrals tripled from 2014 to 2015.

Use the right networks to reach your audience

Facebook’s user base is vast and varied, giving businesses of many types a way to reach their target market. The majority of US internet users are Facebook users, regardless of gender, ethnicity, education, income, or geographic location. Only among Internet users age 65 and up is Facebook use at less than 50 percent, and then just barely (48 percent).

Facebook now delivers half of all social media traffic and 64 percent of social referral revenue to mobile ecommerce sites. The overall volume is pretty small — less than 1.5 percent of all mobile shopping site referrals were generated through Facebook, but that means there’s room for lots of growth.

To support more referrals, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg recently announced new features that make it easier for consumers to get in touch with businesses and to go directly to their mobile shops from Facebook. Businesses can add a blue “shop now” button at the top of their page and a note telling users how long it typically takes the business to respond to private messages. Facebook is testing buy buttons on selected businesses’ pages and ads to let users make purchases without leaving Facebook. Other social networks are expanding their own buy button tools as well.

Pinterest is currently a distant second in social shopping referrals but generates 16 percent of referral-related revenue share. Based on user demographics, Pinterest is an ideal for platform businesses whose audience are those making purchasing decisions about home décor, fashion, fitness gear, and craft goods. Pinterest is expected to more than double its active user base by 2018, going from 151 million active users per month to 329 million — a rate of growth that puts Pinterest ahead of every other social network.

In October, Pinterest announced a major expansion of its buy button program. The first buy buttons within pins debuted on the mobile site in June. Now, with some 60 million buy-buttoned items on the network, Pinterest has partnered with fashion retailer Bloomingdale’s and home goods retailer Wayfair to directly integrate buy button technology into their pins. Along with the new partnerships, Pinterest is making buy buttons available to clients of several major ecommerce platforms.

Twitter, meanwhile, is in the middle of sorting some things out. The company missed its most recent target for user growth and has discounted its ad rates. Twitter recently expanded its buy-button trial, begun last year for some US mobile users, to retailer Best Buy and to clients of selected ecommerce platforms.

Retailers who already have a strong and engaged Twitter following are in the best position to leverage the new “buy” option as the program expands. If your business doesn’t already have an established customer base on Twitter, you will probably see results more quickly if you focus on Facebook or Pinterest.

Court social shoppers with convenience, security, engagement

Whichever networks your business uses, it’s important to make the most of your time and presence there by taking advantage of the tools provided by the networks for better customer engagement.

For example, Facebook now gives business page managers the option to respond to customer comments via private message, which can make resolving service issues more efficient. On Pinterest, Rich Pins can display real-time dynamic pricing for your products and direct shoppers to your product pages. Analyze your transaction data and your social media following to feature items and offers that will resonate with your audience and fit their typical purchase patterns.

When visitors follow your links from social media, reward them with a streamlined purchase and checkout experience. Give them the best possible security — point-to-point encryption and data tokenization — to reduce their data-security worries, especially when they’re shopping on mobile devices.

Shoppers who have a good experience visiting your site from social media are likely to give you repeat business and share your posts to a wider audience.

Liz Gulsvig is content specialist at Forte Payment Systems. She has worked in the payments industry for four years, building content and partnering alongside experts in the payments space. She received both her master’s and bachelor’s degrees in English and writing.

Business communication today is dominated by “the new kid on the block”: writing for social media! But noticeably few companies actively train staff on how to get results: a glaring oversight.

Some tips: firstly don’t forget the “social” in social media! Posts succeed when they’re not just “conversational” in style; they really talk to and with people. They actually foster response in a different way from the “broadcast” style in traditional business writing.

Adaptation is key

So is there a happy medium between formal and informal? There’s no one answer: you need to adapt your style to your target audience. What interests them? What vocabulary would they use? How can your posts add value?

That’s step one towards achieving your objectives. They’ll vary — but it’s generally about engaging, being shared/converting, being relevant, knowledgeable, credible, consistently professional and personable! An extensive list… but every aspect contributes to success.

When building an online community be mindful that, the world over, people prefer to do business with people who care. A style in-between formal and informal is likely to attract their interest.

Be authentic

The next step: be authentic; add something to your readers’ life. If you’re only interested in a conversion, your community will notice.

So why do so many Facebook posts, for example, overdo the “tease”? You know the sort of thing: “A homeless person found a long-lost fountain pen, and you won’t believe what happened next.” What happens next turns out to be a plug for the company or some totally irrelevant fact. Many people avoid clickbait like the plague!

Imagine a real-life situation where someone came up to you and said “Hey, tell me how cool I am, then please buy a car from me and while you’re at it, recommend me to others?” You’d walk away, wouldn’t you? Their style might seem conversational but it’s out-and-out broadcasting. Isn’t it similar with Facebook posts or tweets from people we scarcely know, asking “Hey, like my Facebook page” or “Please RT” or “Let’s connect on LinkedIn”?

Now compare this. A car salesman approaches you when he knows you’re actively looking for a car. He listens to you. He builds rapport; unearths the perhaps unstated issues. He then has the finesse to tailor his message for your needs: to use words that matter to you as a buyer.

How much better might you feel about “you look like you have a lot on your plate. Let me help you in your buying decision and by the way, if you do decide to buy with me, here’s a great offer”.

In stark contrast, the clickbait tease rarely works. Its sole purpose can be to lure people to a webpage that’s nothing to do with the “captivating” headline. That’s infuriating.

Successful social media posts feature the “you,” not just the “I” (compelling though your personal story may be!).

An easy checklist to help:

Be authentic, helpful/add value; converse

Write compelling, relevant headlines; don’t write clickbait

Show you care about readers; invite questions; respond to comments

Include calls to action offering value for them as much as for you

Be concise (provide links to further details needed)

Don’t try to be someone you’re not — or use completely different language to that on your website etc. This undermines credibility/confuses.

So a measured, directly conversational style can work, but don’t sacrifice your corporate identity or professionalism. Use your checklist: in time you’ll be a natural at knowing when to be formal, informal — or the happy medium between the two that so often works best for today’s business.

Social media now permeates our daily lives. Yet, because most of us don’t anticipate being involved in litigation, we don’t consider how our status updates, photographs or tweets could affect us in a lawsuit.

Clients typically don’t consider the impact of their social media posts until their attorneys see them from the perspective of pseudo-judge, only to gasp out with a George Takei-esque “Oh my.”

Out comes the opposing party’s formal discovery request for that social media content and in comes the lawyer’s dilemma: Can lawyers advise clients to delete damning content? Conceal it from public view? Clean up future posts? Court sanctions in this regard have been severe:

An attorney was fined $542,000 and client $180,000 for spoliation of evidence when the lawyer directed the client to delete social media photographs. (Virginia)

Adverse inference instruction was levied against a plaintiff who deactivated social media accounts after defendants requested access. (New Jersey)

An attorney was suspendedfor five years for counseling a client to delete Facebook posts and photographs following a request for production. (Virginia)

But not every court has followed suit.

Such scathing rulings — and lack of consistent authority — have created a chilling effect in the legal community, and in some situations, a “deer in headlights” look when a client asks his or her attorney what to do with Instagram photos showing them intoxicated, in a bar, wearing moose antlers, at 3 a.m. on a Tuesday with a custody case on the horizon.

Florida recently tackled this very issue.

Florida Advisory Opinion 14-1 confirmed that attorneys could advise clients to increase privacy settings (to conceal social media content from public eye) and to remove information relevant to the foreseeable proceeding from social media accounts so long as the data was preserved and no preservation and/or spoliation of evidence rules were broken.

Finally, attorneys got a roadmap. Sort of.

The inquiry commenced with Florida Rule of Professional Conduct 4-3.4(a), which dictates that a lawyer must not unlawfully obstruct another party’s access to evidence or unlawfully alter, destroy or conceal a document or other material that the lawyer knows or reasonably should know is relevant to a pending or a reasonably foreseeable proceeding, nor counsel or assist another person to do such act.

The proper inquiry is whether a client’s social media account is relevant to a “reasonably foreseeable proceeding,” not whether the information is directly related to the matter. That is, information not directly related to the lawsuit may still be relevant. But, the relevancy determination is fact-intensive, with no bright-line rule.

The Committee also declined to define unlawful obstruction or destruction of evidence, although spoliation has been found where evidence is destroyed or significantly altered, or where a party fails to preserve property for another’s use as evidence in pending or reasonably foreseeable litigation.

Likewise, litigants in federal court have a duty to preserve relevant evidence that they know, or reasonably should know, will likely be requested in reasonably foreseeable litigation.

Florida’s decision follows a nationwide trend and comes on the heels of similar decisions by New York, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

What does this mean?

Florida lawyers may now ethically advise their clients to increase social media privacy settings to hide their content from public view. A lawyer may advise the client to use the highest available privacy setting.

Further, a lawyer may advise his or her client, prior to litigation, to remove information from the client’s social media pages, regardless of its relevancy to a reasonably foreseeable proceeding, so long as doing so does not violate rules regarding spoliation.

However, if removed, a backup must be preserved if it is known or reasonably should be known to be relevant to the reasonably foreseeable proceeding. An attorney’s advice must still comport with ethics rules.

Litigants, take caution: don’t count on your posts never reaching the eyes of your judges as such material may still be obtained by able opposing counsel. The moral of the story is, “don’t post anything online that you would be embarrassed for your mother to see.”

There is something strange about social media and branding if you’re an entrepreneur, particularly if you provide some type of professional service.

The reason? It’s because literally your reputation is the business.

You’ve probably heard that a good, healthy respect for social media and an online presence is critical — it affect you personally, it will affect your business, your employees, potential employees and perhaps most critically, your clientele.

Don’t fear it; respect it. Like social media or not, negativity can ruin the hardest-working and smartest business person.

So, a few items to consider:

Not everyone likes you

No matter how amazing or whatever you are, there is always going to be someone who just doesn’t think you’re as wonderful — and that’s OK.

The key is understanding that fact and that some folks, simply because you’re a business person, will not like you. Do what you can to address these issues from an operational standpoint, and if someone is not happy, don’t actively engage nor respond via social — aside from a simple statement: “We have received your information and are reviewing the matter. We appreciate you taking the time to contact us.”

Not everything you read is legitimate

There are literally thousands of fake posts, fake reviews and other negative comments that can be said about a person or business.

But if several random posts about your business that are overtly negative appear out of blue, it should serve as a reminder that while no one and no business and no boss is perfect, reviewing and addressing the concern is an important endeavor.

Perception is reality

This is most important about social media and the brand of the entrepreneur and business. Whatever you are posting to social media, be it your personal Facebook page or Pinterest site, and whatever your business is posting, they are seen as one and the same. It’s hard, if not impossible, particularly in the professional services space, to separate the professional from the service.

Your branded content

While you may be terrified as to what to post in this hyper-offended culture — fear not. The solution is actually a fairly simple strategy — and you’re experiencing it right now. It’s called “branded content.”

Write an article about your experience or expertise. Share a few tips. Conduct some research and get that published. Create some Top 10 lists or even memes.

The bottom line is, social media is great, but it can be bad and even hurt your business — and your feelings. You have to build, protect and manage your reputation through social engagement. Create good content. Review posts, and never feel like you’re alone on an island — and don’t be afraid to call in a pro to help.

Rodger Roeser is CEO of The Eisen Agency, a public relations and content development firm. With offices in Cincinnati and Cleveland, Ohio, the award winning public relations and content development firm specializes in marketing communications strategies for professional services, healthcare, manufacturing and franchised organizations. Contact him at [email protected]or www.TheEisenAgency.com.

Editor’s note: One of the premier events in content marketing, Content Marketing World 2015, will be Sept. 8-11 at the Cleveland Convention Center. Beginning this month Smart Business will profile three of the event’s leading speakers.

Many marketers are now having a kind of reckoning, says Jeffrey K. Rohrs, vice president of marketing insights for Salesforce and author of “Audience: Marketing in the Age of Subscribers, Fans & Followers.”

“They’re realizing they can’t just focus on content development. They can’t have a build-it-and-they-will-come mentality. I call that audience assumption disorder,” he says. “They have to have a strategy to build audiences and retain them to have a lower cost to reach people interested in their messages, products and services. Then they leverage paid media to acquire new customers, broaden their reach and make the content perform better.”

A common mistake

One of the common mistakes that brands, marketers and executives make is that they assume they own the audience.

“You can own your content, your website and your company, but the audience comes and goes as it pleases,” Rohrs says. “In the Internet world, you don’t own the audience. The audience owns itself.”

This is the idea of permission marketing, he says. The audience can opt in or opt out with a click of the computer mouse. Rohrs calls it a proprietary audience, whose attention must be earned.

“If you are not doing things to retain the attention, the audience will naturally contract,” he says.

Brands have to realize that you acquire the permission. You then work to get consistent engagement and monitor the performance and response, Rohrs says. You either grow the relationship because you have other products and services to offer or embrace the fact that audiences are going to grow out of your products and services, but hopefully use them for referral or amplification.

“Proprietary audience development is building audiences that you alone can reach through their permission,” Rohrs says. “They are going to differ within industries, across the street and for different brands. There are going to be ones in which you can always assume their loyalty, like the New England Patriots fans who were raising money to pay the Patriots’ fine from the NFL [for deflating footballs in the Super Bowl].”

Rohrs offers some tried-and-true tips to grow your audience. For a business to grow an audience, it has to understand that growth is measured in three factors: size, engagement and value.

One-to-one level

“With size, it isn’t just how many people,” he says. “It is also what data you are learning about them over time so that you are adding and deepening your knowledge of them as an individual so you can increasingly use this technology to market to them on a one-to-one basis.

“You can bring back the idea of the local butcher — the conversation with the person who knows exactly what you buy every week and has it ready and packaged for you.”

Engagement is capturing and retaining the audience’s attention. Audiences are repositories for attention, but if you do not engage with them over time, if you get an email subscriber and don’t do anything with the individual for three months, the value of that audience has just deteriorated, Rohrs says.

“The attention is greatest at the moment of opt-in, yet you would be amazed at how many companies take days or weeks in this era of instantaneous gratification to reply.

“We had a customer of ours that essentially closed that gap from about a day for the welcome response to under 30 seconds. Just with that activity, they saw about a 20 percent increase in terms of a second-sale capability.”

It’s a new marketing communications argument — which “discipline” should manage the new medium of social media? Should Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn be handled by PR, advertising, HR or something else?

Agencies are springing up that specialize in social media management and any manner of blogging, tweeting, Facebooking and the like. It’s become a verb. We need more friends, more likes, more this and more that.

“Who” is managing your social media is far less important than “what” is being managed. You are trying to engage, to enlighten, to share. You are not trying to sell, although long term and softly that will be the ultimate reward. Social media, by its very definition, is controlled by those who are engaged and those who are sharing their thoughts and their views on any manner of issues or challenges we face as consumers or as businesses. So why the fight as to who “controls” it? Money and power.

The debate brews

Certainly, advertising agencies believe they should manage the discipline because it must be creative and part of your overall marketing mix of clever hooks and fresh ideas. However, your PR agency believes it should manage this as it is the master of sharing a story and providing clarity to your consumers in the written word. Both will invoice you fairly for their time, effort and strategy, and will provide good ideas and fresh thinking to drive traffic.

What you truly need is insight, and the confidence and ability to trust in yourself or that so-called “expert.” Who really “controls” social media? If you’re smart — it’s the 3Cs — clients, customers and constituents. You control your social media, whether you’re hiring a firm or you attempt to manage it in-house.

A good agency, regardless of being PR or advertising, will advise you to craft a solid brand and brand communications strategy, then utilize the virtually unlimited universe of social media and its many outlets to share that brand and tell your story. From there you engage your publics to some desired form of action or activity.

Manage the infinite?

Managing social media is, by my definition, attempting to manage the infinite. Rather, you must discuss what your end goal is and how that particular social media tactic will fit into, support and drive content from your overall marketing communications objective. It is not the answer; it is an option.

Should your business, regardless of what that business is, “do” social media? Of course! The question and the strategy is why are we doing social media and what exactly are we trying to achieve. How does it support our branding initiatives? How does it help our sales team? How does it make our candidate or our issue more accessible?

Social media allows you to fulfill the most basic and sacred tenant of public relations — the ability to have open, ongoing and one-to-one communications directly with your publics in an attempt to foster a shared conversation and engagement.

You want to hear from an unhappy customer so you can fix it, not spin it. You want to offer ideas and specials and promotions to those that value it most. You want your business to be the best it can be so you value the ideas, conversations and suggestions of your target publics and foster that.

Stop worrying about who manages your social media. Most likely it’s you. It is your choice to do or not do, to engage or let others talk about your business without your response. Social media happens regardless of whether you want it to or not. If you lack a social media strategy, it’s time to get a social media plan of action.

Rodger Roeser is owner, president and CEO of The Eisen Agency. He is also the national chairman of The Public Relations Agency Owner’s Association and works with other PR firms across the country to assist in their operations and profitability. He can be reached at [email protected]

California passed more than 800 new laws in 2012, and Shane P. Criqui, litigation attorney at Stradling Yocca Carlson & Rauth, says, “It’s virtually impossible for any business person to keep track.”

He says among those of interest to businesses are new laws that govern social media in the context of an employee and employer relationship, and broad legislative changes regarding California LLCs.

“That’s why it’s important to have a discussion with your counsel and make sure you understand how these laws may affect your business,” Criqui says.

Smart Business spoke with Criqui to better understand two of California’s law changes.

What is changing regarding social media?

California has added protections for employees using social media to the state’s labor code, which establishes privacy protections for individuals and limits what employers can lawfully demand of employees. It helps avoid situations where employers demand private social media passwords and take adverse actions against an employee based on the content of his or her account. The law also applies to job applicants.

Specifically, an employer can’t require an employee to disclose username or password information for personal social media accounts; require an employee to access his or her social media accounts in the presence of the employer; or otherwise divulge personal social media information. Further, employers can’t discharge, discipline or retaliate against employees for not complying with such requests.

There are, however, exceptions. An employer can go after information on a social media account that’s reasonably believed to be relevant to investigations of employee misconduct or a violation of law. Employers also may require employee disclosure of passwords necessary for accessing an employer-issued electronic device.

What constitutes social media?

The definition of social media as it applies to this law is very broad and can include any electronic service, account or content such as videos, photos, blogs, podcasts, text and instant messages, and websites.

Further, while the law applies to accessing ‘personal social media,’ the term ‘personal’ is not further defined, which may create ambiguity. For example, an employee’s LinkedIn account could be used to promote his or her employer’s business but is also ‘personal’ to the employee.

What changes are coming for limited liability companies?

A 2012 bill that becomes effective Jan. 1, 2014, repeals California’s Beverly-Killea Limited Liability Company Act and replaces it with the California Revised Uniform Limited Liability Company Act. It will apply to all California LLCs existing on Jan. 1, 2014, and no LLC can opt out.

The new law presumes an LLC is member managed, unless the company’s articles of incorporation and operating agreement specifically provide otherwise. In member-managed agreements, all members can act as agents of the LLC, where in manager managed arrangements, it’s only the managers.

Other provisions are specific to fiduciary duties. Expressly, the law says managers can’t eliminate the duty of loyalty, which a manager typically owes to the LLC along with the duty of care. However, duties of care and loyalty can be modified ‘in a written operating agreement with the informed written consent of the members.’ For instance, the duty of care can be lowered, although not ‘unreasonably reduced.’

The new act also states that while an operating agreement may ‘eliminate or limit’ a member or manager’s liability for monetary damages with respect to a breach of the duty of care, it cannot do so with respect to a breach of the duty of loyalty.

What should affected companies do?

While prior operating agreements will remain in effect after Jan. 1, 2014, the new act will apply to ‘acts,’ ‘transactions’ and ‘contracts’ entered into on or after that date. Accordingly, it makes sense for LLCs to talk with counsel to make sure the new default rules don’t change an LLC’s understanding of its existing rights and obligations.

Since infiltrating the business world, the use of social media has increased at an incredible rate. Last year, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings caused considerable commotion in the financial community when he announced via Facebook that Netflix had exceeded 1 billion viewing hours in a month for the first time. There was heavy debate as to whether it was appropriate for a high-level executive to divulge material information regarding a public entity’s success through social media.

Fast forward one year and the SEC just released a statement in April allowing companies to make announcements through social media outlets provided investors have the ability to gain access to material information at the same time. Clearly, social media has become a mainstream tool for companies and is an issue management must address.

Smart Business spoke with Matthew P. Breuer, J.D., an associate with Cendrowski Corporate Advisors, about how the use of social media can introduce risk to your company.

What are some of the major risks and issues with social media?

Social media pose risks to companies in a variety of ways. Perhaps the biggest risk stems from reputational impact on an organization, which can come from both social media interaction by the company and/or through public discussion about the organization through social media.

The potential damages of posting confidential information is another risk companies must take into account. This can be particularly difficult to prevent because the release of confidential information could be done inadvertently by an employee or by an unknown individual with insider knowledge, which makes it all the more important for a company to manage and document who will have access to key material information. An unauthorized employee speaking on the behalf of the company and libelous statements are other major risks that should not be overlooked. In addition, the risks of social media can trickle down to affect a company even at the level of an individual employee with a risk as simple as decreased employee productivity. Consequently, these risks should all be addressed by management when developing a strategic plan.

Why is social media such a difficult subject for companies to address?

Companies are increasingly using social media, but still have difficulty grasping its changing intricacies, especially as it continues to evolve at a rapid pace and revolutionize marketing and customer interaction. The difficulty of handling the identified risks of social media can also be attributed to the balancing that needs to be done to ensure an organization still reaps the benefits of social media.

Despite all of the risks, social media serves as an excellent channel for marketing contact, increasing company exposure, customer base development, increasing sales activity and as a tool for recruiting. Moreover, using social media can allow a company to gain a better understanding of customer or consumer perception of the company. Developing an approach to utilize the benefits while mitigating the risks of social media is never an easy task.

What can companies do to mitigate risk?

Mitigating the risks associated with social media begins from the top. Management must have a clear and defined social media policy already entrenched within a company. The policy should clearly outline expectations and address social media interaction deemed to be forbidden. This policy is especially imperative in smaller companies. While larger companies may be able to have positions created for this purpose or outsource the responsibilities to outside agencies, smaller companies will have less resources and time to monitor their company’s interaction with social media. In addition, management must be aware of any legal ramifications that could arise from the use of social media. Management’s strategic plan should also determine the individual(s) who will have access to a company’s social media.

Companies may never be able to eliminate all of the risks of using social media, but management having a clearly communicated plan already in place is an effective way to mitigate these risks.

While many companies would be like a ship without its captain after the loss of its illustrious founder, Jess Jackson, the Jackson Family Enterprises had a very capable successor in Rick Tigner — one who would continue the family-owned winery group’s reputation and make mom and dad’s favorite chardonnay into the favorite of their millenial children too.

In April 2011, Jess Jackson died of cancer at the age of 81. He was an individual whose vision, perseverance and work ethic helped transform the wine industry.

He started the Kendall-Jackson wine business with the 1974 purchase of an 80-acre pear and walnut orchard in Lakeport, Calif., that he converted to a vineyard. Nearly 40 years later, Jackson Family Wines is among the world’s most successful family-owned winery groups, composed of more than 35 individual wineries.

Jackson Family Enterprises is the company that oversees Jackson Family Wines, its global sales organizations and the Kendall-Jackson brand. Tigner was named president of Jackson Family Enterprises a year before Jackson passed away. A 24-year veteran of the alcohol beverage industry, Tigner has held positions at Miller Brewing Co., Gallo, Louis M. Martini and nearly 20 years with Jackson Family Wines.

“When I first became in charge of Jackson Family Wines three years ago, one of my goals was to actually get one team, one dream,” Tigner says. “If I can get all 1,200 employees going in the same direction at the same time, how powerful would that be?”

The company, its 1,200 employees and its more than 30 brands of wine, was solely in Tigner’s hands, and it was now up to him to keep the operation flourishing.

“Our company mission is to be the best wine company in the world,” Tigner says.

In any industry, it is extremely easy to be hands-off with consumers. In the wine industry, many vineyards deal with distributors or trade partners and aren’t very tight with the consumer. Tigner says that isn’t the case at Jackson Family Wines.

“Innovation comes in different forms and fashions,” he says. “In the wine business, what you get is a lot of what I call the ‘sea of sameness.’ You look at a wine magazine ad and you see a bottle and vineyard, but it can be anybody’s bottle and anybody’s vineyard. The question is how do you connect with a consumer in different ways?”

Last January, Tigner was featured on the TV show “Undercover Boss.” He saw this as a new way for a wine company, especially a family wine company, to go on television and tell people about who the business is as a family, as a company and how it produces its products. The blogosphere gave generally rave review about Tigner’s TV appearance.

“The one thing that we’re always very, very focused on is quality,” he says. “We want to make sure that consumers know that whether it’s the Kendall-Jackson brand or the La Crema brand, quality is one of the foundations of our organization.”

To tell its consumers about its products, Jackson Family Wines is putting more focus on social media. The company recently hired a digital marketing team to make sure it has a presence on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

“A lot of companies have pretty pictures,” Tigner says. “What we actually want is engaging content … versus the standard picture of a bottle in a Wine Spectator or Wine Enthusiast magazine.”

Being involved in social media is becoming increasingly important, but it isn’t enough to just have a Facebook page; you have to engage with your fans and potential customers.

“If you look at Facebook, a lot of brands have Facebook, but the question is do you listen to the people who are on your Facebook page?” he says. “Do you react to how they talk about you on Facebook? We listen, and we learn from that activity. These are our friends and family who actually went online and signed up on our Facebook page, because they’re looking for interaction.”

Tigner says this interaction can’t be boring or constantly the same old thing. You have to be looking for ways to keep your audience involved and engaged.

“The key for us in regard to capturing our consumer is actually listening to them,” he says. “We create content that they want to see on video or in photos. We’ve done a lot of recipes. A lot of people want to talk about food and wine pairings. We have spent hours and hours and hours putting together a recipe program for our website.”

Jackson Family Wines has a lot of pages on its website and on its social media because even if a consumer doesn’t go to them all, those pages are there and available to them. The same thing goes for YouTube.

“If you go to YouTube and capture that consumer and they see a training video or a wine education video or a food-and-wine program, the next time they go look at your YouTube, you better have new content,” he says. “It has to be ongoing engagement, intriguing and informative. If you don’t have that, then you’ll lose your consumer. Those are things we’ve done to continually engage the consumer.”

What this kind of engagement helps Jackson Family Wines do more than anything is reach a more diverse audience. Many of the company’s consumers are baby boomers and social media is helping the brand reach the younger generations.

“We want to keep the baby boomers like myself who’ve been drinking our brands for a long time,” Tigner says. “But we want to capture the millennials. Who is that 25- to 35-year-old out there who has disposable income to buy premium wine? We have to give them the messaging and the content.

“We’re going out and making it new and fresh for them so it’s not just their mom and dad’s favorite chardonnay, but it becomes their favorite chardonnay and then their favorite cabernet or pinot noir.”

Educate about your product

The wine industry can be very complex due to the sheer number of wine styles, brands and varietals that make each bottle different. For Jackson Family Wines, it is crucial that its staff and its business partners are knowledgeable about the company’s products.

“In our company, we have 1,200 employees,” Tigner says. “In our sales team, there are about 400. I would argue we have the best sales team in the world and the best fine wine team.”

Tigner makes this argument because the company has four master sommeliers on staff and nine more in training out of a total of 180 in the U.S., who help to educate the sales team.

“They educate our sales teams, our distributors and our internal staff,” Tigner says. “We want to make sure everyone who works for our company, whether in IT, marketing or finance, has knowledge about wine and a passion about wine.”

Transferring that knowledge outside of the company is the hard part. Jackson Family Wines has to work with its distributors, trade partners and, more recently, directly with consumers to educate them on the products.

“In this business, 20 years ago, manufacturers or wineries like us spent all our time selling our wine to distributors and educating our distributors who then sold to retail stores who then sold to consumers,” he says. “About 15 years ago, that was still important, but the next piece was actually us communicating with our trade partners.

“In the last five years, all that is still important, but now we’re talking directly to our consumer, whether it’s online, in our tasting rooms or our wine club program.”

One of the biggest things related to education that Tigner has to keep aligned is the messaging Jackson Family Wines spreads both internally and externally.

“We broke down our strategic initiatives into three simple buckets,” he says. “You want to keep it simple so everyone knows what the plan is. Our strategy is lands, brands and people. So that when people want to know what are we working on, you can break it down to land, brands and people, and then we have the initiatives below that.”

To aid in keeping this message aligned and helping to push the company forward, Tigner has implemented management meetings.

“In the last three years since I’ve been put in charge, I’ve had more senior management team meetings,” he says. “We really didn’t have those before.

“Every quarter, we bring in the top 50 managers of the company plus outside guests and visitors and we talk about lands, brands and people. We talk about the strategic initiatives. I want to make sure everything we put in place at the beginning of the process is still being worked on.”

While his management meetings are a new tradition, there are some things that Tigner wants to maintain, like the company’s culture.

“When I first took over being the president, we had a great training program, recruiting program and succession program,” he says. “I want to make sure we have that exact same culture. Culture doesn’t show up on a P&L, but culture is very, very important to the company.”

The culture is something Tigner wants to be identical whether it’s the IT, finance, marketing or production departments.

“I want to make sure all our employees are treated similar and fair throughout the entire organization,” he says. “I take it upon myself on a regular basis to check in with middle management, lower management, field workers and sales workers because I want to make sure everyone has the right communication and we’re all on the same page.

“I spend most of my time making sure the messaging of the organization runs wide and deep.”

Adrienne Lenhoff, president and CEO, Shazaaam PR and Marketing Communications

Does your company employ a multigenerational workforce? If so, your organization might significantly benefit by adopting a reciprocal mentoring program that leverages talents, skills and knowledge to bridge generational gaps surrounding technology — such as social media — corporate culture and team building.

Given the generational divide, older and younger workers often feel disconnected when it comes to adapting to technology, corporate culture and working as a team.

With reciprocal mentoring, workers across all generations individually and collectively play a pivotal role in creating multigenerational buy-in to the workplace changes that accompany the adoption of technological tools such as social media, cloud computing and text usage that will streamline workflow communication, processes and practices.

Reciprocal mentoring takes the traditional mentoring concept of a seasoned employee guiding a worker’s development and transfers it from a one-way relationship to a two-way or team-building relationship in which newer or younger employees also impart their knowledge and guidance.

It can be especially important when it comes to the integration of newer technologies into the pre-existing corporate culture and workflow processes. To create a dynamic program, it’s important to understand the intrinsic generational differences within your workforce.

Consider your longtime employees. When someone has been on the job for an extended length of time, they form ideas and habits that have been repeatedly reinforced by experience and success.

When they are introduced to a new tool, piece of information or technology, some might feel threatened because it changes what they know and how they have become used to doing things, and the immediate challenge will be to figure out how they might adapt this new knowledge into their existing work practices.

As you add younger workers, it’s important to understand that the Y2K generation, or millennials, have a much different set of motivators from many baby boomer, generation X and generation Y employees.

Millennials thrive in situations that allow them to take ownership of their skills, knowledge and work. Challenge and change are key motivators for most millennials.

A successful reciprocal mentoring program will allow your millennial workers the opportunity to impart their technical savvy, to teach seasoned employees how to leverage and navigate the world of social media and the time-saving and efficiency tools available by leveraging mobile, messaging, text and cloud computing technologies.

In my company, we have taken more of a team-building approach to our reciprocal mentoring. We have set up a schedule of twice-monthly lunch-and-learn events. For these lunch-and-learns, we have put together a calendar of topics that my staff and I feel are of interest and importance to our business. We have tapped every employee, from entry-level to executive, with a topic or series of topics that each will present during one of the events. To keep things organized and to provide structure, we have set up the following outline for each presentation:

■ Who is presenting? Give us some of your personal, professional and/or academic background.

■ What is the topic you are covering?

■ Why is it important to our organization?

■ How can it or does it help move our organization forward?

■ How and/or when do we put it into practice?

■ What are some examples, case studies or best practices surrounding the topic?

During the presentation, we ask the presenter to use presentation tools to provide a show and tell of the topic he or she is covering.

By providing employees a forum to share their skill sets and knowledge, we create an environment where individuals feel they are making a valuable contribution to the entire team. By presenting in a team-like atmosphere, we are fostering individual presentation skills and creating an environment of team support, knowledge-sharing and problem-solving.

Adrienne Lenhoff is president and CEO of Buzzphoria Social Media Marketing and Online Reputation Management, Shazaaam Public Relations and Marketing Communications, and Promo Marketing Team, which conducts product sampling, mobile tours and events. Her companies have been seven times named a 101 Metropolitan Detroit Best and Brightest Company to Work for, a two-time Crain’s Detroit Cool Company to Work For and a National Best and Brightest Company to Work For. She can be reached at [email protected] Follow her on Twitter @alenhoff.

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